Here is a really important article laying out just exactly why Obama Care is such a mess. Now that Chief Justice Roberts has decided that the intent, the viability of the Affordable Care Act is more legally important than its actual language, it’s worth taking a few moments to remember just how the law was passed, and why the inconsistencies and internal contradictions were not just predictable, but inevitable.

Obama keeps calling it health care and assumes that he has given millions of people who lacked health care a great gift. But he has given them only health insurance, and really poor insurance at that. The American people did not want it, and it polled poorly. The Democratic leadership, fearful that the momentum was failing decided to rush a bill through the Senate before they left for Christmas 2009.

On December 18, Majority Leader Harry Reid merged two separate pending bills into a bill to be voted on by the Senate…. To meet the self-imposed Christmas deadline, Reid provided only six days for debate. The Senate bill passed on a strict party line vote, 60-39.

Few people, including Senators and their staffs, had time to read the whole 2,700 page bill, much less note any possible weaknesses, flaws, or ambiguities. Reid and other Senate Democrats weren’t terribly worried about this. The bill was set to go to the House, then back to the Senate, then to “reconciliation” between the House and the Senate versions, and then to the president for his signature. Everyone thought there would be plenty of opportunities to make changes.

But a major impediment arose soon after the Senate bill passed. Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy had died that past summer, and the January special election to replace him was won by Republican Scott Brown, who ran as a strong opponent of Obamacare. This deprived the Democrats of their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and meant that the Senate would not be able to pass a revised bill. The only way to pass Obamacare at this point was to have the House vote on identical legislation to the Senate bill, while engaging in legally dubious procedural maneuvering. And that’s what the Democrats did.

They passed the bill as is and a separate reconciliation bill with minor changes, eliminating some of the most obvious flaws, but leaving the rest intact. So they passed a Senate Bill that nobody wanted and that no one had read in its entirety, and no one understood. Obama and the Democrats believed that it would become increasingly popular and Democrats would continue to control both houses of Congress. Anything wrong with it could be quickly fixed.

Didn’t work out that way. The people never liked it and Republicans took over the House and then the Senate, partly because of ObamaCare. Republicans don’t want to fix a law that they unanimously opposed. The Court, it was hoped, would realize that those who rush through a mess of a law that they haven’t read and don’t understand, with no political support from the other side have to live with the consequences. Instead the majority decided that when the law is unworkable as written they should help out the other branches.

So, you blithely promise Americans who don’t want any such thing that their cost of heath care will go down, that they can keep their doctors, that their medical care will be more efficient, add volumes of regulations and taxes, add a vast bureaucracy to manage it all and make more regulations — pay for the new bureaucracy, then add all sorts of gimmicks sure to reduce costs (that don’t work at all) wrap it up in a computer debacle that only the federal government could manage to come up with, and there you have it. Only a Democrat would believe that could work.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told an audience gathered at a White House conference that “normal people.” not “climate deniers” will win the debate on global warming. This is not the first time she has said that distinguished scientists were “not normal people.” And of course “deniers” is the usual crude leftist language.

McCarthy’s remarks came as she was talking about the reasons why the EPA put out a report on the negative health impacts global warming will have on public health. She said the agency puts out such reports to educate the public, not answer critiques from global warming skeptics.

Ms. McCarthy is an administrator, not a scientist, and it shows. The agency hasn’t yet been able to come up with the science on which their regulations are based. When questioned at hearings, she doesn’t have simple answers to simple questions. One of my personal irritations is the frequency with which they attempt to sell their power grabs by claiming the number of lives (usually children;s) they will save in the future because of their actions. That’s disgraceful, and pure hogwash.

More hogwash: The EPA has released a report claiming “global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will bring fewer extreme droughts, floods, storms and wildfires. The report claims cutting emissions would result in billions of dollars in benefits for the U.S. and save thousands of lives every year. Floods, storms and wildfires are not caused by climate, future benefits can’t really be predicted unless the computer climate suddenly developed astonishing new powers. Ms. McCarthy, like far too many federal bureaucrats is on a power trip to grab new responsibilities, more funding and a bigger agency. Here she goes again:

Regardless, the EPA says a global effort to cut emissions would result in about 70,000 fewer people dying from extreme heat and poor air quality in the U.S., less damage from flooding and storm surges on coastal properties and other weather events by 2100.

More interestingly, the EPA said global emissions cuts would mean an “estimated 40%-59% fewer severe and extreme droughts” in the U.S. by the year 2100. The report adds that in “the Southwest, the number of severe and extreme droughts is projected to nearly quadruple by the end of the century” if nothing is done. But with emissions reductions, “the incidence of drought is not projected to change substantially from present day.”

She added “We can save tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars annually in the United States…” Hubris and hyperbole, and as I said — hogwash.

Speaking at a fundraiser in San Francisco on Friday, President Obama warned “Well within our children’s lifetimes, on our current pace, the oceans go up maybe two, maybe three, maybe four feet.”

From massive registration fraud, to disenfranchising military votes, to backing spoiler candidates and more, Democrats are pulling every dirty trick they can think of to hold on to as many seats as possible. And these are just the stories we know about. Vote fraud is inherently difficult to catch, so if we are hearing about this many cases already, you can bet there is a great deal more fraud going undiscovered.

This is why we all need to volunteer to help get out the Republican vote. It’s very simple: we need to get SO many Republicans out to vote, that there simply aren’t any close elections. It’s the close elections that Democrats try to steal. Just ask George Bush, Dino Rossi or Norm Coleman. We can’t just win, we have to win by more than the margin of fraud.

You can volunteer to help your Republican candidate, or (if your local race isn’t competitive) OTHER vulnerable Republican candidates by going here, or by calling your local GOP. Volunteering is extremely easy. They give you a script, and tell you everything you need to do. Most campaigns are looking for people to call Republican voters and remind them to get their ballots in, go door to door at houses they have pegged as likely Republican leaners to ask if they plan to vote, and they are looking for people to poll watch on election day to prevent/record/and object to Democrat cheating.

A HUGE hat tip to Michelle Malkin, Gateway Pundit, and Hot Air for finding the vast majority of these stories. I just wanted to put them all together in one place. I will try to update this post as new stories come in. Be sure to send us tips if you see stories that aren’t reported here.

Illegal aliens canvassing across state for Patty Murray and Democrats . (ACORN was previously convicted in Washington for committing the worst case of registration fraud in state history. And heavily Democrat King County has been a regular source of corrupt shenanigans from disenfranchising military ballots, to disenfranchising voters in Republican leaning districts, to “finding” hundreds of previously uncounted and in some cases unsecured ballots to steal the gubernatorial race from Dino Rossi after he won the first two counts.)

In California, state regulators have allowed Anthem Blue Cross to move ahead with rate hikes, which average 14%. Blue Shield of California is allowed by regulators to move ahead with rate increases — averaging 19% and as high as 29% — for 250,000 individual California policyholders. Anthem’s original plan was to increase premiums as much as 39%, but they got a lot of criticism from consumers regulators and even President Obama. A consultant found math errors.

Here in Washington State, we just got notification of a 16% rate hike. Welcome to ObamaCare. Eventually government insurance will begin to look cheap — but that was the plan all along. They promised that ObamaCare would save money, their ideas would make health care more efficient, everyone would be insured, preventative care would save money, computerizing health care would save money. All lies. All Lies. All Lies.

The federal government has been slapping “energy-efficient” ratings on products that don’t even exist — including a bogus space heater with a duster stuck to it and an alarm clock supposedly powered by gasoline.

These fake products were submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy for approval as part of an undercover investigation by the Government Accountability Office.

The office wanted to see how easily the feds could be duped, since the Energy Star program used to identify products as energy savers serves as a guide to businesses looking for such modern marvels and the basis for millions of dollars in incentivizing tax credits — including $300 million from the stimulus.

The products fooled the federal government three out of four times. Of the 20 products submitted for approval, 15 were given the thumbs up. GAO reported that the federal government generally did not ask for critical evidence to back up its claims about how energy-efficient — or real — its bogus products were. [read more]

It turns out that when Democrats talk about “restoring science to its rightful place,” they mean corrupting it and lying about it in order to grow government. Or, in other words, pretty much the same thing they do with everything else.

Mark Steyn sums up my feelings well, with far fewer expletives. Read his piece. I know many people don’t understand how destructive this bill is. Steyn’s piece is a good starting place. We can either be a nation of free independent people, or we can be a nation of welfare recipients. We cannot be both. It doesn’t work. Our founders (and others) understood what Obama and the rest of the socialists do not:

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

~ Thomas Jefferson

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

~ Benjamin Franklin

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”

~ Alexander Tytler

Obama and the Democrats have just lurched us towards decline. We were a very abundant, very generous nation. Democrats and Obama are using greed and selfishness to try to skip straight to dependency, Dependency on Democrats. It truly is evil.

I’ll write more when I recover my optimism. The Elephant’s Child chose today to have computer problems. She’ll hopefully be back tomorrow.

Until then, America WILL overturn or repeal this. If not because we still cherish liberty, than at least because the punishment in higher premiums, higher costs, higher taxes, less employment, less opportunity will start long before any supposed benefits.